Power in Global Trade Governance: Is the EU a Unitary Actor,a Tool for Dominance,or a Site of Contestation? GATS and the TTIP Negotiations

The European Union (EU) plays multiple roles within global trade governance as a unitary actor with particular interests to promote, a tool for dominance by powerful interests, and a site of contestation facilitating civil society mobilization. Identifying these roles is key to analyzing the role of the EU particularly in times of crisis in global trade governance where new forms of politics are most likely to emerge. This is investigated through considering two cases of politically sensitive trade negotiation in which the EU played, and continues to play, an active role: the GATS 2000 negotiations and the EU-US TTIP.     

Market Power Europe—A Constructive Critique

Market Power Europe (MPE) constitutes an important contribution to the literature on the global role and actorness of the EU. In order to develop MPE as a theory, this contribution provides an assessment of how Russia, the USA and China have converged towards three EU trade policies in 2013. The analysis finds that MPE fails to account for important dynamics related to externalization in the three cases. In order to improve MPE analytically, the article suggests that MPE should include three intervening variables to account for the EU’s ability to externalize its policies and act as MPE in practice.     

Regionalism and African agency: negotiating an Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union and SADC-Minus

This article investigates the regional dynamics of African agency in the case of negotiations on an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the EU and a group of Southern African countries, known as SADC-Minus. I argue that these negotiations were shaped by a pattern of differentiated responses to the choice set on offer under the EPAs by SADC-Minus policy makers and by a series of strategic interactions and power plays between them. I offer two contributions to an emerging literature on the role of African agency in international politics. First, I argue for a clear separation between ontological claims about the structure–agency relationship and empirical questions about the preferences, strategies and influence of African actors. Second, I suggest that, in order to understand the regional dynamics of African agency, it is important to pay close attention to the diversity and contingency of African preferences and to the role of both power politics and rhetorical contestation in regional political processes.     

Coping with financial crises: explaining variety in regional arrangements

Financial regional arrangements vary across countries and change over time. Until recently, most economists and political scientists took the European model of monetary integration as the yardstick to which all other regional financial arrangements had to measure up in this article. It is argued that the Euro crisis provides an opportunity for scholars to adopt a different perspective that does not interpret the variety of financial arrangements merely as economic deficiencies caused by the incapacity or unwillingness of regions to follow the European model. Instead, the comparative study of monetary and financial regionalism has to account for the different factors that shape variations. These go from different levels of economic development, over regional political and economic preferences to historical processes which shape the institutional context and the constellation of interests and social forces. Such an approach, which integrates economic and political science approaches, de-centres the Euro model and opens up a new understanding of the global diversity of regional monetary and financial cooperation, and their potential to cope with financial crises.     

中欧关系演进的内在逻辑:基于欧盟对华援助的视角

欧盟对华援助的主要表现在援助资金呈递增趋势、援助领域由早期的农业援助转向经济和社会改革领域、援助项目要按照"标准化"要求操作等三个方面。从援助特征可以看出欧盟对华援助背后的政治经济逻辑正好吻合了新自由主义对国际政治经济生活进行必要干预的主张,把欧盟成员国和欧盟内部的社会经验在援助国得以拓展,使其经济运行和社会秩序朝着欧盟所拟定的方向发展,这也恰好表明欧盟对华援助的行为不可能偏离自利立场。但是,中国在坚持独立的外交政策和方针下,使得中欧关系逐步朝务实性方向发展,在合作基础上解决面临的共同难题,谋求长期的战略性合作伙伴关系依然符合中欧关系发展的趋势。     

Public commitment strategies in intergovernmental negotiations on the EU Constitutional Treaty

We analyze the impact of public commitment strategies as bargaining tools in the negotiations on the EU Constitutional Treaty using a sequential-bargaining model with incomplete information. The analysis suggests selection bias in observable public commitments with respect to the kind of issues that are publicly challenged as well as the kind of governments that will ‘go public’. Public commitments are more likely under high uncertainty over audience costs. Further, the effect of public commitments on the duration and outcome of negotiation is conditional as well. In our empirical analysis, where we analyze the intergovernmental stage of the negotiations on the European Constitutional Treaty, we find strong empirical support for each of our theoretical predictions. Governments were most likely to commit publicly if they represented a domestic constituency that was negative about the EU Constitution and, at the same time, contained many undecided respondents. Moreover, these public commitments were generally quickly accommodated. In contrast, public commitments were less likely to lead to any changes if they were made by governments representing a domestic constituency that was relatively positive about the draft Constitution or negative and decided. In the latter case, however, public statements made bargaining deadlock more likely.

Race and Class

This article examines the rise of the Independent Workers Union (IWU) in Ireland, North and South, in relation to the bifurcation of trade unionism on the Island, from 1900 until the demise of the so-called Celtic tiger in the early years of the twenty-first century. It is argued that two competing ideological and political trajectories defined the major divisions in the Irish labour movement and where given added impetus with the formation of two separate states after 1920. One tradition was committed to an idea of a progressive British empire, while the other was born of a movement linking together trade union, class and national autonomy. A trade union with a long history and recent past, the IWU represents a labour movement formation whose tradition extends the latter: it is committed to developing forms of opposition to state and capital. If more subdued since the partition of the island, this tradition was reignited with the implosion of Social Partnership in the South and the rise of the new sectarianism in the North. Neoliberalism, with its consequent assault upon labour and its various institutions more broadly, provided additional impetus to the creation of the IWU in 2004. The article also assesses its various alternative union and community organising strategies.     

Dynamic approaches to government formation and the generic instability of decisive structures in Japan

This paper relaxes the “party as unitary actor” assumption that characterises much theoretical work on party competition and government formation. It first sketches some of the theoretical implications of assuming that legislators are free to defect from parties of which they are members, and to join other parties that might be willing to accept them. This leads to a dynamic legislative party system that is quite distinct from the type of party system assumed by most models, which remains essentially static between elections. Working from “office-seeking” assumptions about the motivations of legislators that seem very plausible in the Japanese case, it shows that such a dynamic party system is likely to be unstable, since there are generic gains to be derived from the fission and fusion of parties. The paper then moves on to explore the Japanese case in these terms. The Japanese party system is self-evidently dynamic and characterised by a high degree of flux, with legislative parties regularly splitting and fusing between elections. The evidence suggests that large parties that pass a certain size threshold can be attractors in the dynamic system, both offering benefits to and receiving them from defectors from other parties. In this way, a “near-majority” party can pass the majority threshold between elections, as happened with the Japanese LDP.     

Multi-level Games: The Serbian Government’s Strategy towards Kosovo and the EU under the Progressive Party

ABSTRACT

Since the signing of the historic ‘Brussels Agreement’ on 19 April 2013 on the normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia, Serbian President Aleksandar Vu?i? and the Progressive Party have oscillated between competing tensions emanating from seeking membership in the European Union and those stemming from the retention of Kosovo, including the party’s uncompromising position on non-recognition. Following two-level game theory, this paper offers a comparative analysis of the Progressive Party’s multi-level game strategy vis-à-vis Kosovo and the EU, arguing that while the initial success of the Brussels Agreement can predominantly be attributed to the rise in popular support for EU accession, Serbian policy towards Kosovo appears to be far less clear and often contradictory and therefore, Serbian government strategy cannot have been influenced by public opinion.     

HPLC-MS/MS法检测大鼠体内氟胺酮及其代谢物动态分布规律

目的研究氟胺酮及其代谢物(去甲氟胺酮)在大鼠体内动态分布规律,为涉氟胺酮死亡案件法医学鉴定提供实验依据。方法将104只SD大鼠随机分为13组,1组作为空白对照组,其余12组,禁食12h,经腹腔注射0.09mg/kg氟胺酮后,分别在不同时间点(15min、30min、45min、60min、90min、120min、180min、240min、300min、360min、420min、480min)处死,立即取心血、心、肝、脾、肺、肾、脑,用高效液相色谱-三重四级杆质谱HPLC-MS/MS检测各组织中氟胺酮及代谢物去甲氟胺酮的浓度。结果氟胺酮经腹腔注射进入体内后,迅速分布于各组织,且在15min内达最高浓度。在480min内,氟胺酮和去甲氟胺酮在血液中均有分布,且含量均高于其他组织;其他组织中氟胺酮在肝、肾、脾中分布较多;去甲氟胺酮在肝、肾中分布较多。结论氟胺酮及去甲氟胺酮大鼠体内的动态分布规律可以为涉氟胺酮死亡案件提供数据支撑。